Webinars

Occupants use windows to control their thermal comfort and indoor air quality (IAQ). However, occupants often have to make a compromise between thermal, acoustic and visual comfort, IAQ and energy use for space conditioning. Moreover, they are not only looking for good indoor environmental quality, but also for their needs for security and privacy.

Ventilative cooling emerges to be a key element in the strategy to meet the cooling demand in buildings while cutting the CO2 emissions. Ventilative cooling also enhances thermal comfort and mitigates heat stress in buildings. Despite these benefits, the practical adoption of ventilative cooling remains limited among designers. There is still a need for design guidelines and assessment methods in standard weather conditions, extreme scenarios (such as heat waves) and urban environments.

In the context of energy use reduction, low energy buildings are becoming more widespread. This kind of construction requires a good envelope airtightness to prevent uncontrolled leakages of conditioned air leading to energy losses. As a result, more and more ventilation systems are installed to ensure a sufficient air change rate, to guarantee good indoor air quality and building durability while controlling energy losses.

In this webinar, we addressed the opportunities offered by smart ventilation strategies, which include a wide range of systems depending on the type of sensing parameters (CO₂, humidity, occupancy, etc.), the type of sensing combinations, the type of installation (centralized/decentralized), the types of control algorithms, etc. We will also quantify their potential from and energy and IAQ point of view based on existing and newly developed assessment framework in the annex.

In this webinar, we addressed the opportunities to use novel materials (from advanced functional nano-materials to bio-based building materials) as building components to actively/passively manage the IAQ, for example, through active paint, wallboards, and textiles coated with advanced sorbents or catalysts and quantify their potential, based on the assessment framework developed in the IEA EBC Annex 86 “Energy Efficient Indoor Air Quality Management in Residential Buildings”.

Air infiltration in buildings has multiple consequences on energy use and indoor environmental quality. Therefore, in the last 10 years many countries have introduced requirements for building airtightness in their EP-regulation. Those requirements often prescribe that a test is performed by a qualified tester and that every test performed is recorded in a database.  Hundreds of thousands of data are now available in Europe.

The current development in building energy efficiency towards nZEB buildings represents a number of new challenges to design and construction. One of these major challenges is the increased need for cooling in these highly insulated and airtight buildings, which is not only present in the summer period but also in the shoulder seasons and in offices even in midwinter. Resilient ventilative cooling can be an energy efficient solution to address this cooling challenge in buildings.

Air infiltration in buildings has multiple consequences on energy use and indoor environmental quality which depend on the location and distribution of leakages. Among others, pollutant infiltration and air draft are highly affected by leakage distribution. In current practice, leakage detection is frequently performed together with an airtightness test. Leakage detection methods allow to identify the locations of the leakages, but in most cases do not allow to quantify the amount of leakage corresponding to each identified leakage.